Great perks, lots of social events, comfortable office, the company invested a lot to become “Great Place To Work”

Cons

Middle managements need to have more respect to people. Yes freshBooks is a fast growing company which experiencing lots of changes, but all the hard works we have done in the past need to be treated with respect. Lots of great people who worked there over 3 years get pushed away. The HR can’t be trusted at all, I emailed HR with some of my concerns and questions, then she forwarded the email to my manager :-(

Advice to Management

Great perks and “Great Place to Work” will help you attract people but not keep them. You need a better HR department, someone won’t hire a non-experienced employee just because they are related.

Hi there, thank you for submitting a review. It’s wonderful to hear that you feel strongly about our perks and FreshBooker events.

As for the concern you raised regarding HR, the HR role at FB is to support FreshBookers in bringing issues and concerns to resolution. We do this in partnership with each FreshBooker, and, only involve management if necessary to bring the concern to resolution. Although there are some instances where a manager needs to be involved for resolution, we only involve them if the FreshBooker is looped in and agrees that this is the best plan of action. Our HR team has met again to ensure this is how every instance is handled and we thank you for sharing your thoughts.... MoreLess

Opportunity - I've been at FreshBooks for well over 5 years, and have watched it grow from a 'startup' to a full fledged business. All along the way, I've always had the opportunity to grow and develop here in big ways. I've never felt stagnant, and have been surrounded by great people who work hard and care about what they do. If you put in the effort, you will succeed here. Its been fun being able to watch so many people build their careers here.

Culture - Frequent company events, trips to the cottage, friendly faces, a workplace where people are overwhelmingly supportive and kind, this is the fabric of FreshBooks.

Location - Might be a con for some as it's out of the downtown core, but the Junction Area is increasingly becoming a great place to work/live. Lots of parks, restaurants, and places to grab lunch.

Cons

Change - There has been growing pains, like any evolving company. Some folks have had a hard time adapting to shifts in the business. Moving from a startup with a lack of much structure to a proper business had definitely brought a few wobbly moments.

Migration - We have been in a limbo state for a few years, putting all energy into migrating customers to our new platform. This has burnt out a lot of people, with some ultimately leaving. I think we've gained a lot of learnings here. Things have felt better over the last 6 months as we've slowly moved forward.

Advice to Management

Its important to keep encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit that makes FreshBooks great, always give employees the resources and opportunity to take initiative and do great things. Not bogged down by process or too much structure.

Don' t get too distracted by profit/short term financial success, never forget about the small business owner that our company is founded on. This is key to our long term growth.

Thank you for sharing. The pace of growth at FreshBooks is amazing and has it's challenges. We're all learning as we grow...fun and rewarding! We couldn't do any of this without you so thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts!... MoreLess

Thank you for sharing your experience as an employee at FreshBooks and for all of your hard work on our Support team. It's awesome to read how proud you are of your work & your colleagues. Thank you so much for your Support!... MoreLess

- strong mission driven culture around helping small businesses and the self employed grow their own businesses- impressive engineering and product management teams- high growth company with tremendous opportunities for career progression- benefits and innovation days are best in class- commitment to continuously improving diversity, inclusivity and belonging backed by research studies and strategy- large investment in training for people managers and top senior leaders

Cons

- junction location can be logistically challenging versus downtown- some employees are not motivated to push for excellence-

Advice to Management

- continue to invest in top tier engineering, marketing and sales talent- take this amazing brand into more international markets- get out in the Toronto tech community more to expose this strong employee brand

The Culture at FreshBooks is better than any company that I have ever worked at. It is a pleasure to go to work with such great people who are just as talented. Love the additional social parties and events that help to keep the environment fun!

Cons

Growing pains of a small company. Some perceived lack of accountability across the company that is getting better.

Advice to Management

Keep the culture strong! Make business decision that can provide the best value to the customers that will result in increased long term value to FreshBooks.

Incredible open communication from executives, making strides towards an inclusive work environment, fantastic company events, parties and team building outings. I once considered this the best workplace I had encountered in my 10+ year career.

Mike McDerment, the CEO, is an incredibly open and honest leader. He regularly gives talks at the weekly company "Short Hands" lunch gathering, discussing his thoughts and feelings about the direction of the company and other topics, as well as fielding questions. His willingness to engage with difficult questions, which are some times anonymous, is inspiring.

For most of my time at FreshBooks I have enjoyed coming to the office to see my friends, chat with people at lunch, and having meaningful work that improves the lives of FreshBooks customers.

3 weeks of vacation (with yearly carry-over), plus a full Christmas break, 12 sick days, and plenty of fun company events and outings. Company parties every few months really help create bonds between people from different departments.

6 "Innovation Days" per quarter in the software development department are a great opportunity to direct your energy to things you feel are important. You could improve on some part of the app that stands out to you, find a team and collaborate on a complex project, or work on a talk for a conference.

FreshBooks has also started on the journey to make a more "inclusive and diverse" work environment. This is a noble goal and I believe most of the people involved are doing so in good faith. FreshBooks is a very inclusive place to work based on your gender and identity, as we allow people to bring their authentic selves to work. That said, there are some ideological bullies in the committee leading this effort who may hamper their own efforts by alienating people.

Cons

A dramatic shift in the social fabric of the company, onerous project development processes, weak product/software development leadership, and poor opportunities for advancement unless you land on the right team.

My perspective comes from someone working on a software development team. I write some of these comments with a heavy heart because there has been quite a dramatic shift from the company I loved when I first started.

There has been a dramatic shift in the social fabric of the company over the past year, with many long-tenure employees leaving and breaking down the old social networks that made coming to work so enjoyable. I believe that this is due to a lack of meaningful, ambitious work. The types of projects that teams have taken on in the past year feel less vital. Many of the people who have been leaving have been incredibly talented and were being under-utilized in their roles at FreshBooks.

The software/project development process at FreshBooks is quite onerous; there is a top-down, design-by-committee system that is very difficult to fight against. We often write huge amounts of code to adhere to heavy-handed designs regardless of the software development costs. Projects that could take a month to build may take three due to "beautiful" design, landmines in the codebase and the inability to do much about either.

There have been some significant leadership departures from my department over the past year and it feels like current leadership is overwhelmed and lacks direction. We rarely see or hear from developer leadership, who seem to have no goals or vision for the product or our application stack.

As for advancement, if you are lucky to be on a development team who gets good projects you are likely to be promoted, but being stuck on a team with maintenance work or difficult, contentious projects can cause career stagnation.

Fight for your own career development, do not rely on mentorship, direction or guidance from your manager.

Advice to Management

Fix product development leadership. Bring in someone new who has a vision of how to structure software developers to maximize their value. Put pressure on senior/principal developers to focus more on quality code and reusability rather than "just get it done." It is difficult for any developers to obtain full knowledge of the codebase due to its unnecessary complexity. Efforts to improve this are always hampered by apathy and lack of people power.

Develop an ambitious goal for the company and stop playing catch-up.

Be wary of creating a culture of fear around diversity and inclusion. People have expressed fear openly and in private at discussing this sensitive topic due to some ideological bullying and "performative outrage."

Keep embracing Honesty, because it is the most special thing about management at FreshBooks, and the best tool to pull the company through these difficult times.

Note: I am rating "senior management" as a 3 below due to product development leadership, not the exec team. I would rate the exec team as a 5 and product development leadership as a 1.

Thanks for sharing your insights. Please also share your feedback via our Census Survey which is happening right now, it’s a key internal tool our team uses to gather perspective and data so we can collectively & continually improve FreshBooks.

FreshBooks has a huge mission: to reshape the world for self-employed professionals. With such a grand mandate, we do have a number of Product Development teams working on different projects. If you, or anyone else, feels like you’re on the wrong team, please review this with your Manager or any of our leaders including Mike. Perhaps our leadership team needs to better explain the importance of the work each team is doing, or perhaps we need to find a much better fit for your interests.

It’s an exciting time at FreshBooks and we’re certainly in the midst of change. We’re at the tail end of rebuilding our product & migrating users to the new platform. Some of the processes you’ve referred to may have worked well when rebuilding the product but won’t carry us forward into the next new phase of innovation. A number of teams are experimenting with new ways of working to meet the new needs of a relaunched platform. We’ve also revitalized the mission and mandate for teams to accelerate delivering extraordinary experiences to our customers.

One of our recent themes has been Emergent Leadership. Future product innovation relies on leadership and ideas throughout FreshBooks. We’ve launched Innovation Days to provide more space to experiment and the presentations we’ve seen are showing extraordinary customer experiences. Together with an ambitious technical roadmap we expect many more extraordinary experiences in the future.

As we enter a new phase of development, we’ve also expanded our Product Development leadership team with promotions and new hires – this represents a tremendous amount of years of experience at industry-leading companies around the world. Some of our new leadership are still very new in their roles and we hope you’ll give them a chance to settle in and make a positive impact. Our Product Development team is so well positioned for greatness right now!

Some FreshBooks veterans have moved on to other career opportunities. Many began at FreshBooks, new to their careers in Product Development 5+ years ago. FreshBooks was a great place for them to learn and grow. We’re sad to see some of our friends move on but thrilled for them and equally proud that FreshBooks provided the environment for them to flourish. We’re committed to keeping FreshBooks a place where talent has the opportunity to blossom.

We deeply value an open and inclusive workplace where we can all express a variety of viewpoints and come together to produce extraordinary experiences for our customers. That means constantly striving to be better. Thanks again for sharing your feedback.... MoreLess